MIT Launches 10 Climate CoLab Contests

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has launched a set of 10 new contests, via the Climate CoLab, meant to spur action on climate change.

The contests are actively seeking “high-impact proposals on how people, organizations and governments can tackle major climate change challenges.” Up for grabs are a number of different prizes and distinctions — including $10,000 in cash and the opportunity to make a presentation at MIT.

“The mission of the Climate CoLab is to test how crowds and experts can work together to solve large, complex problems, like climate change,” stated MIT Sloan Professor Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and founder of the Climate CoLab.

The plan calls for two stages of offerings, the first of which will allow those interested to submit proposals on various climate change “challenge” solutions; the second of which will ask those participating to “package different proposals together to form national and global climate strategies that use simplified climate models to estimate the GHG reductions that would result.”

The MIT lab ran a pilot contest on this approach in 2015, with Henry Paulson, former US Secretary of Treasury and former CEO of Goldman Sachs; Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute (WRI); and Janos Pasztor, then-current United Nations Assistant Secretary-General on Climate Change, overseeing the global contest as Advisors.

…Each proposal will be evaluated by Judges, as well as a team of emission modelers, who will estimate the impact the proposal would have on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Winners will be chosen in each contest.

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